Monster/Beauty
Building the Body of Love
Joanna Frueh(Author)
University of California Press
1st Edition
Published on 19. February 2001
Book
Hardback
353 pages
978-0-520-22113-0 (ISBN)
Description
This daring, intensely personal book challenges both conventional and feminist ideas about beauty by asking us to take pleasure in beauty without shame, and to see and feel the erotic in everyday life. Bringing together her varied experiences as a poet, art historian, bodybuilder, and noted performance artist, Joanna Frueh shows us how to move beyond society's equation of youth with beauty toward an aesthetic for the fully erotic human being. A lush combination of autobiography, theory, photography, and poetry, this book continues to develop the ideas about the erotic, beauty, older women, sex, and pleasure that Frueh first addressed in "Erotic Faculties". "Monster/Beauty" examines these issues using a provocative, often explicit, set of examples.Frueh admiringly looks at the bodies and mindsets of midlife female bodybuilders, rethinks the vampire, and revises our ideas about traditional models of beauty, such as Aphrodite. Above all, she boldly brings her personal experience into the text, weaving her reflections on female sensuality with contemporary theory.
These linked essays are as much a performance as they are a discussion, breaking down the barriers between the personal and the academic, and the erotic and the intellectual. Frueh writes passionately and beautifully, and the result is a much-needed exploration of beauty myths and taboos.
These linked essays are as much a performance as they are a discussion, breaking down the barriers between the personal and the academic, and the erotic and the intellectual. Frueh writes passionately and beautifully, and the result is a much-needed exploration of beauty myths and taboos.
More details
Edition
First Edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Berkerley
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
19 b-w photographs
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 143 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
726 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-520-22113-0 (9780520221130)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
04/2023
1st Edition
Naval Institute Press
€33.99
Available for download
Person
Joanna Frueh is Professor of Art History at the University of Nevada, Reno; author of Erotic Faculties (California, 1996) and Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective (1989); and coeditor of Picturing the Modern Amazon (2000), Feminist Art Criticism: Art, Identity, Action (1994), and Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology (1991).
Content
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Aphrodite's Garden
Photographs by Russell Dudley and Joanna Frueh
EROTIC WEIGHT
1. Aphrodisia and Erotogenesis
2. Hypermuscular Performance
3. The Passionate Wife, the Passionate Daughter
PLEASURE AND PEDAGOGY
4. The Professor's Body
5. Consensual Erotics
6. Exertions of Flesh on Flesh
7. The Primacy of Pleasure: Leisure, Crush, the Dominatrix
8. The Amorous Stepmother: A Pedagogical Experiment
ICONS OF PLEASURE
9. Dressing Aphrodite
10. Blonde Bunny Goddess
11. Border Cowgirl
12. Scarlet Women
13. Sade, My Sweet, My Truffle; or, Giving a Fuck
14. Vampiric Strategies
List of Illustrations
Index
Introduction
Aphrodite's Garden
Photographs by Russell Dudley and Joanna Frueh
EROTIC WEIGHT
1. Aphrodisia and Erotogenesis
2. Hypermuscular Performance
3. The Passionate Wife, the Passionate Daughter
PLEASURE AND PEDAGOGY
4. The Professor's Body
5. Consensual Erotics
6. Exertions of Flesh on Flesh
7. The Primacy of Pleasure: Leisure, Crush, the Dominatrix
8. The Amorous Stepmother: A Pedagogical Experiment
ICONS OF PLEASURE
9. Dressing Aphrodite
10. Blonde Bunny Goddess
11. Border Cowgirl
12. Scarlet Women
13. Sade, My Sweet, My Truffle; or, Giving a Fuck
14. Vampiric Strategies
List of Illustrations
Index